University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE BLUE MISTS.

MY college course was at last finished satisfactorily
to my mother and friends. What joy there is to
be got in college honors was mine. I studied
faithfully and graduated with the valedictory.

Nevertheless I came back home again a sadder if not a
wiser man than I went. In fact a tendency to fits of despondency
and dejection had been growing upon me in these
last two years of my college life.

With all the self-confidence and conceit that is usually
attributed to young men, and of which they have their
share undoubtedly, they still have their times of walking
through troubled waters, and sinking in deep mire where
there is no standing.

During my last year, the question “What are you good
for?” had often borne down like a nightmare upon me.
When I entered college all was distant, golden, indefinite,
and I was sure that I was good for almost anything that
could be named. Nothing that ever had been attained by
man looked to me impossible. Riches, honor, fame, any
thing that any other man unassisted had wrought out for
himself with his own right arm, I could work out also.

But as I measured myself with real tasks, and as I rubbed
and grated against other minds and whirled round and
round in the various experiences of college life, I grew
smaller and smaller in my own esteem, and oftener and
oftener in my lonely hours it seemed as if some evil genius
delighted to lord it over me and sitting at my bed-side or
fire-side to say “What are you good for, to what purpose
all the pains and money that have been thrown away on

you? You'll never be anything; you'll only mortify your
poor mother that has set her heart on you, and make
your Uncle Jacob ashamed of you.” Can any anguish
equal the depths of those blues in which a man's whole
self hangs in suspense before his own eyes, and he doubts
whether he himself, with his entire outfit and apparatus,
body, soul, and spirit, isn't to be, after all, a complete
failure? Better, he thinks never to have been born, than to
be born to no purpose. Then first he wrestles with the
question, What is life for, and what am I to do or seek
in it? It seems to be not without purpose, that the active
life-work of the great representative Man of Men was
ushered in by a forty days dreary wandering in the wilderness
hungry, faint, and tempted of the Devil; for certainly,
after education has pretty thoroughly waked up all there
is in a man, and the time is at hand that he is to make
the decision what to do with it, there often comes a wandering,
darkened, unsettled, tempted passage in his life. In
Christ's temptations we may see all that besets the young
man.

The daily bread question, or how to get a living,—the
ambitious heavings, or the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them, all to be got by some yielding to Satan,—the
ostentations impulse to come down on the world with a rush
and a sensation,—these are mirrored in a young man's smaller
life just as they were in that great life. The whole Heavens
can be reflected in the little pool as in the broad ocean!

All these elements of unrest had been boiling in my mind
during the last year. Who wants to be nothing in the great
world? No young man at this time of his course. The wisdom
of becoming nothing that he may possess all things is
too high for this stage of immaturity.

I came into college as simple, and contented, and satisfied,
as a huckleberry bush in a sweet-fern pasture. I felt
rich enough for all I wanted to do, and my path of life lay
before me defined with great simplicity.

But my intimacy with Miss Ellery, her marriage and all

that pertained to it, had brought before my eyes the world
of wealth and fashion, a world which a young collegian
may try to despise, and about which he may write the most
disparaging moral reflections, but which has, after all, its
power to trouble his soul. The consciousness of being gloveless,
and threadbare in toilet, comes over one in certain
atmospheres, as the consciousness of nakedness to Adam
and Eve. It is true that in the institution where I attended,
as in many other rural colleges in New England, I was backed
up by a majority of healthy-minded, hardy men, of real
mark and worth, children of honest toil and self-respecting
poverty, who were bravely working their way up through
education to the prizes and attainments of life. Simple
economies were therefore well understood and respected in
the college.

Nevertheless there is something not altogether vulgar in
the attractions which wealth enables one to throw around
himself. I was a social favorite in college, and took a stand
among my fellows as a writer and speaker, and so had a
considerable share of that sincere sort of flattery which college
boys lavish on each other. I was invited and made
much of by some whose means were ample, whose apartments
were luxuriously and tastefully furnished, but who
were none the less good scholars and high-minded gentlemanly
fellows.

In their vacations I had been invited to their houses, and
had seen all the refinement, the repose, the ease and the quietude
that comes from the possession of wealth in the hands of
those who know how to use it. Wealth in such hands gives
opportunities of the broadest culture, ability to live in the
wisest manner, freedom to choose the healthiest surroundings
both for mind and body, not restricted by considerations
of expense; and how could I think it anything else than
an object ardently to be sought?

It is true, my rich friends seemed equally to enjoy the vacations
in my little, plain, mountain home. People genererally
are insensible to advantages they have always enjoyed,

and have an appetite for something new; so the homely rusticity
of our house, the perfect freedom from conventionalities,
the wild, mountain scenery, the wholesome detail of
farm life, the barn with its sweet stores of hay, and its
nooks and corners and hiding places, the gathering in of
our apples, and the making of cider, the corn-huskings and
Thanksgiving frolics, seemed to have their interest and
delights to them, and they often told me I was a lucky fellow
to be born to such pleasant surroundings. But I thought
within myself, It is easy to say this when you feel the control
of thousands in your pocket, when if you are tired you can
go to any land or country of the earth for change of scene.

In fact we see in history that the crusade of St. Francis in
favor of Poverty was not begun by a poor man, but by a
young nobleman who had known nothing hitherto but
wealth and luxury. It is from the rich, if from any, that our
grasping age must learn renunciation and simplicity. It
is easier to renounce a good which one has tried and of which
one knows all the attendant thorns and stings than to renounce
one that has been only painted by the imagination,
and whose want has been keenly felt. When I came
to the College I came from the controlling power of home
influences. At an early age I had felt the strength of that
sphere of spirituality that encircled the lives of my parents,
and, being very receptive and sympathetic, had reflected in
my childish nature all their feelings.

I had renounced the world before I knew what the world
was. I had joined my father's church and was looked upon
as one destined in time to take up my father's work of the
ministry.

Four years had passed and I came back to my mother,
weakened and doubting, indisposed to take up the holy
work to which in my early days I looked forward with enthusiasm,
yet with all the sadness which comes from indecision
as to one's life-object.

To be a minister is to embrace a life of poverty, of toil, of
self-denial. To do this, not only with cheerfulness but with

an enthusiasm which shall bear down all before it, which
shall elevate it into the region of moral poetry and ideality,
requires a fervid, unshaken faith. The man must feel the
power of an endless life, be lifted above things material
and temporal to things sublime and eternal.

Now it is one peculiarity of the professors of the Christian
religion that they have not, at least of late years, arranged
their system of education with any wise adaptation to having
their young men come out of it Christians. In this they
differ from many other religionists. The Brahmins educate
their sons so that they shall infallibly become Brahmins;
the Jews so that they shall infallibly be Jews; the Mohammedans
so that they shall be Mohammedans; but the Christians
educate their sons so that nearly half of them turn out
unbelievers—professors of no religion at all.

There is a book which the Christian world unite in declaring
to be an infallible revelation from Heaven. It has
been the judgment of critics that the various writings in
this volume excel other writings in point of mere literary
merit as much as they do in purity and elevation of the
moral sentiment. Yet it is remarkable that the critical
study of these sacred writings in their original tongues
is not in most of our Christian colleges considered as an
essential part of the education of a Christian gentleman,
while the heathen literature of Greece and Rome is treated
as something indispensable, and to be gained at all hazards.

It is a fact that from the time that the boy begins to fit
for college, his mind is so driven and pressed with the effort
to acquire the classical literature, that there is no time to
acquire the literature of the Bible, neither is it associated
in his mind with the dignity and respect of a classical
attainment. He must be familiar with Horace and Ovid,
with Cicero and Plato, æschylus and Homer in their original
tongues, but the majestic poetry of the Old Testament, and
its sages and seers and prophets, become with every advancing
year more unintelligible to him. A thoroughly educated
graduate of most of our colleges is unprepared to read

intelligently many parts of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul's epistles.
The scripture lessons of the church service often
strike on his ear as a strange quaint babble of peculiar
sounds, without rhyme or reason. Uncultured and uneducated
in all that should enable him to understand them, he
is only preserved by a sort of educational awe from regarding
them as the jargon of barbarians.

Meanwhile, this literature of the Bible, strange, wierd,
sibylline, and full of unfulfilled needs and requirements of
study, is being assailed in detail through all the courses of a
boy's college life. The objections to it as a divine revelation
relate to critical questions in languages of which he is
ignorant, and yet they are everywhere; they are in the
air he breathes, they permeate all literature, they enter
into modern science, they disintegrate and wear away, bit
by bit, his reverence and his confidence.

This work had been going on insensibly in my head during
my college life, notwithstanding the loyalty of my
heart. During those years I had learned to associate the
Bible with the most sacred memories of home, with the
dearest loves of home life. It was woven with remembrances
of daily gatherings around the family altar, with
scenes of deepest emotion when I had seen my father and
mother fly to its shelter and rest upon its promises. There
were passages that never recurred to me except with the
sound of my father's vibrating voice, penetrating their
words with a never dying power. The Bible was to me
like a father and a mother, and the doubts, and queries,
the respectful suggestions of incredulity, the mildly suggestive
abatements of its authority, which met me, now here
and now there, in all the course of my readings and studies,
were as painful to me as reflections cast on my father's
probity or my mother's honor.

I would not listen to them, I would not give them
voice, I smothered them in the deepest recesses of my
heart, while meantime the daily pressure that came on me
in the studies and requirements of college life left me

neither leisure nor inclination to pursue the researches that
should clear them up.

To be sure, nothing is so important as the soul—nothing is
of so much moment as religion, and the question “Is this
God's book or is it not?” is the question of questions. It
underlies all things, and he who is wise would drop all other
things and undergo any toil and make any studies that should
fit him to judge understandingly on this point. But I speak
from experience when I say that the course of study in
christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar
school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and
overladen with all other studies that there is no probability
that he will find the time or the inclination for such investigation.

In most cases he will do just what I did, throw himself
upon the studies proposed to him, work enough to meet
the demands of the hour, and put off the acquisition of that
more important knowledge to an indefinite future, and sigh,
and go backward in his faith.

But without faith or with a faith trembling and uncertain,
how is a man to turn his back on the world that is before
him—the world that he can see, hear, touch and taste—to
work for the world that is unseen and eternal?

I will not repeat the flattering words that often fell on my
ear and said to me. “You can make your way anywhere;
you can be anything you please.” And then there were
voices that said in my heart, “I may have wealth, and with it
means of power, of culture, of taste, of luxury. If I only set
out for that, I may get it.” And then, in contrast, came that
life I had seen my father live, in its grand simplicity, in
its enthusiastic sincerity, in its exulting sense of joy in what
he was doing, down to the last mortal moment, and I wished,
oh, how fervently! that I could believe as he did. But
to be a minister merely from a sense of duty—to bear the
burden of poverty with no perception of the unspeakable
riches which Christ hath placed therein—who would not
shrink from a life so grating and so cold? To choose the

ministry as a pedestal for oratory and self-display and poetic
religious sentiment, and thus to attain distinction and easy
position, and the command of fashionable luxury, seemed
to me a temptation to desecration still more terrible, and
I dreaded the hour which should close my college life and
make a decision inevitable.

It was with a sober and sad heart that I closed my college
course and parted from class-mates—jolly fellows with
whom had rolled away the four best years of my life—years'
that as one goes on afterwards in age look brighter and
brighter in the distance. It was a lonesome and pokerish
operation to dismantle the room that had long been my
home, to bargain away my furniture, pack my books,
and bid a final farewell to all the old quiddities and oddities
that I had grown attached to in the quaint little village.
The parting from Alma Mater is a second leaving of
home—and this time for the great world. There is no staving
off the battle of life now—the tents are struck, the
camp-fires put out, and one must be on the march.